The Rendezvous Read Online Free PDF Page B

was going to be physically sick. If he had come on Freischer at that moment he would have shot him.
    There was another whisper, forced out with great effort.
    â€˜Did I tell them?’
    She hadn’t been able to remember; she had a confused memory of someone screaming and screaming, but there were no words. She might have told them. She probably had told them, otherwise why had they stopped?…
    â€˜No.’ He said it very firmly and clearly so that she would remember. ‘You were very brave. You didn’t tell them anything.’
    It was true. Her contact at Lyons had given enough away to put a lead on the man in Paris. Even Freischer had to admit that if they gave the girl any more that day she’d be dead by the evening. She closed her eyes. ‘Thank God,’ she said.
    â€˜Major Bradford, could you come a moment, sir?’
    Robert Bradford was sitting behind the desk in the S.S. Commandant’s office; he had a huge pile of cards in front of him and he had been trying to go through them, checking them from a special list. So far he had ticked off four names and drawn a line through nearly a hundred others. These had been shot, hanged, or gone to the gas chambers, the other four had been discovered among the starving thousands in the camp. There were many more names still unchecked. They were supplied by the French resistance. Other officers were dealing with the Dutch, Belgian and Scandinavian survivors. He looked up at the young sergeant; his name was Broome but his grandparents had come to the States from Poland. He was only twenty-three and what he had seen in the twenty-four hours since his company liberated Buchenwald had put ten years on him. He was permanently green; nobody wanted to eat much, few of Bradford’s men were even talking while they went through the camp, rounding up the prisoners, opening one Bluebeard’s chamber after another in the building and finding walls of the dead and living piled in rows one upon another. The stench of the place alone was indescribable. They had found the guards too, and the camp commandant, and when he was confronted by them Bradford found himself too benumbed by horror to feel anything so human as anger or hatred. He had put them under guard, and then ordered them to begin burying the heaps of dead which lay round the compounds.
    â€˜What’s the matter, Sergeant?’
    â€˜We were going through the block marked J, sir, and we found some women still in there. There’s one we can’t get out; she’s crazy. If you try and get near her she goes berserk. The men don’t want to manhandle her, sir, and I don’t blame them. I guess we’d like you to come down.’
    â€˜Okay,’ Robert Bradford said. ‘I’m coming.’
    â€˜She’s over here, sir,’ Broome said. ‘By those bunks in the corner.’
    There was little light in the building; it was full of tiers of wooden bunks, and the atmosphere was thick and foul with human scents. He saw some women huddled together in a corner, all staring at him with eyes that protruded from their waxen faces. One of his men was trying to persuade them to have some of his chocolate ration.
    â€˜In there,’ Broome said. ‘In the bottom bunk.’
    Bradford bent down and in the poor light he saw a girl crouching on hands and knees. The hair hung down to her shoulders and her eyes were fixed open in a glare of terror. She wore a filthy camp uniform dress and her body was thin as a child’s under the rags.
    â€˜I think she’s French,’ Broome said. ‘When you get too close she starts to yell at you.’
    â€˜Right,’ Bradford said. He moved in deliberately and held out a hand. ‘Mademoiselle?’
    The girl sprang back, cringing. ‘No! Go away! Go away from me! I’m not going to tell you!’
    He answered her in French. ‘I’m a friend,’ he said. ‘I’m an American officer.